War, as Clausewitz so memorably put it, is the continuation of politics by other means. Strikingly, the United States under its Nobel Peace Prize-winning president has been pursuing war itself by other means over the last few years, a campaign that has blurred the lines of legality and lethality, technology and weaponry, as it has spread from Afghanistan to an ever-widening swath of the planet. Which is why we’ve devoted this, our third annual War Issue, to the question of Barack Obama’s Secret Wars. From drones that rain death down on Pakistan’s tribal areas to the collateral damage of a “war on terror” that’s still not over in the Horn of Africa, we may all come to look back on the Obama years as a definitive chapter in the spread of this new way of war.